Closing eyes and forgetting the world seems small comfort yet I take it as it is, an escape from broken branches and a rotting stump. Branches that once reached for lofty heights, supple lengths filled with life and growth. Now dry, cracked. Brittle. Strewn about waiting for savage fires embrace as kindling, as this is the measure of their worth now realised

The stump that once connected roots deep and far reaching to their sky loving counterparts slowly decaying in the wake of moss, termite and age. Failing as all grand things must in their time, a pathetic remnant of strength once envied.

I am tired

What impossible destruction visited to once proud flora, what insidious reduction of life to ruin. I have grown, flourished and fallen to the elements. No water may quench the thirst of my despair, no sun rays may invigorate that which hastens to dark disrepair. The forest mourns but all are static and reach in vain to a fallen willow

I am tired

Spread my shrinking substance across the hungry undergrowth, let all within my radius take sustenance from my meager offerings. This is my final gift, a far cry from hearth and home that offered sanctuary and shade but it is what I have left to imbue.

Sleep comes swift and the leaves are of sienna hue, there is naught I can do to resist the approaching Fall. Perhaps in time the acorn may take hold and what I once was might reclaim towering observance, but earthen nurseries are sparse. Creeper vines thick. The weather unforgiving.

I stood beneath the sky, reached above, and clapped my hands twice, “okay, chop-chop… your vacation is over, time to come home now!”

so the sky opened its mouth, but the only thing to ever come out (to touch the Earth again) was the blanket of snow, the airplane in Moscow, a small piece of shrapnel, the skydiver in Nashville, raindrops from the window-sill, cigarette butts in the landfill, a winter storm’s icicle a grieving mother’s feet for the first time in twenty seven weeks.